A Museum at the Forefront of Digitization

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CreditLaurent Cilluffo

By Stephen Heyman

May 13, 2015

While many major museums have embarked on sweeping digitization projects, the one at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is distinguished by its ambition to be among the most exhaustive. By 2020, the museum intends to digitize all one million objects in its collection — from masterpieces by Rembrandt and Vermeer to Delft pottery, silk brocade gowns and matchlock muskets. Today, 25 percent of the museum’s collection, including nearly all of its paintings, is freely available for download in high-resolution on rijksmuseum.nl, with new images being added every day.

What sets the Rijksmuseum’s digitization program apart is not just its scope, but also a very progressive approach to copyright. Works have a Creative Commons “0” status, which means they can be modified and disseminated in practically any way. That includes exploiting the images for commercial use — downloaded artworks have been turned into iPhone cases, scarves, even a tattoo.

The museum encourages experimentation, hosting creative contests and offering .tiff files (also for free) to those who want to republish images in large formats.

“It’s really a fundamental belief of the management at the Rijksmuseum that sharing is the new having,” said Cecile van der Harten, the head of the museum’s image department, who has spent the past decade leading the digitization effort. “It means you want to try do anything and everything to let people enjoy the collection, whether it’s live or online.”

While this view may be fueled by altruism, it is also a concession to the dynamics of the Internet. If the museum didn’t share its collection, lower-quality reproductions of the works would still circulate online. “The thought was people will steal it anyhow,” Ms. Van der Harten said. “So the least we could do is try to convince people that they should use the best version available for free. Then we can guarantee the quality.”

Last month, the Rijksmuseum sponsored a conference on new ways of digitizing cultural heritage that was attended by representatives from many museums, including the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both those institutions are leaders in the field of digitization, Ms. Van der Harten said. The Smithsonian in particular has already captured 2.2 million objects out of a collection of around 138 million, developing new, automated digitization methods like a conveyor-belt scanner.

Ms. Van der Harten said that because the Rijksmuseum’s collection was comparatively small, it had the luxury to photograph many of its works by hand.

With this method, prints or drawings can still be photographed relatively quickly (about 150 to 200 a day), but other objects take much more time. A single painting — photographed front and back, framed and unframed, and then in detail — can take more than an hour. A costume requires at least two days: one to place it on a mannequin, another to photograph it in conjunction with a curator.

One might wonder if there are institutional risks for a museum to make its entire collection freely available online in high resolution.

Might fewer people actually visit in person? That fear must have been partially dispelled by last year’s record-breaking attendance figures.

“Digital photography gives us the possibility to aim for something that is really, really close to the original,” Ms. Van der Harten said. “But still the sensation of standing before a painting that is real, where you can see all the little nuances in the light, that sensation cannot be beat by a photo.”